Matt Jonns

Investing in, and building, tech companies with non-technical founders | Founder and CEO @ Founder + Lightning

I build and back ambitious ventures - with product, capital, and talent.

It started with helping to digitise my family’s business 15 years ago. Since then, I’ve worked with 40+ startups to turn ideas into companies - raising millions and launching dozens of products along the way.

That journey led to Founder + Lightning and now The Lightning Group - a group of connected services that help startups, scale-ups, and corporates move faster and smarter.

What we do: 

• Strategy and product development that gets you to launch and beyond 
• Access to capital and investor networks
• High-performing, flexible talent (onshore + offshore)
• Designing and building venture studios 

If you’re looking to raise, launch, or scale - or you’re just figuring out where to start - feel free to reach out.

https://www.founderandlightning.com


Founder & CEO

(Formerly ucreate.it)

We partner with ambitious, Non-tech Founders and equip them with the team, tools, expertise and scale to build highly successful technology companies

100+ team - 25 portfolio companies - £100 million + valuation - £30 million + raised 

Our offices are in London, Cardiff, Chandigarh and Kraków

We don’t talk enough about founder risk.

Both financial and personal risk. 

The kind that creeps in when there’s no safety net.
No guaranteed salary. No fallback option. No HR to call when things go sideways. The fear of being “unemployable” if it all goes wrong. 

In the UK, we’ve built up decent support for employees - and that’s great. 
But we’re still awkward about supporting founders.
The people who create the jobs, that then pay the taxes, and drive most of the innovation.

Over the last 10 years I’ve worked with 100+ early-stage founders.
And I’ve seen the same things, over and over again:

• Founders paying their team before they pay themselves
• Signing personal guarantees just to unlock a small credit line
• Funding payroll from personal savings - or worse, debt
• Making redundancies and taking all that personal pressure on 
• Spending their weekends trying to fix things quietly so their team doesn’t panic
• Going months without knowing if they’ll be able to raise, ship, or even survive

It’s a lonely spot to operate from.
And most people don’t see it - especially once the PR narrative kicks in.

But the truth is: the first 12–24 months of any startup (and often years and years of any business) usually look like this.
Low pay, high stress, total exposure.

We should be doing more to support those people - not just when they raise or exit, but when they’re in the middle of the mess.

If you’re a founder - 
what’s something you’ve done to keep the lights on that no one saw ?

Venture Studio Founder & Startup Investor.

🎥 Gabriel Isserlis

Unlocking space for creativity: Founder/CEO of Tutti

My expertise lies at the intersection of creativity and technology, which has inspired 
1. Tutti: "AirBnB for creative spaces" (2018-2025)
2. SuperScout: "Your personal database of locations, supercharged with AI" (2024- )

(Side note: I won't accept connection requests unless you give me a compelling reason, or I've met you in person)

With degrees in film making and software development, as well as a decade of work in music, theatre, and photography, and years building tech startups, I have a unique set of insights. 

These have inspired creative technical solutions to problems I have experienced first hand in the creative industries, one of the fastest growing sectors that is already worth more than $3tr to humanity. 

Follow Tutti & SuperScout to see those ideas become a reality

www.tutti.space - www.superscout.ai

Follow me here to get honest stories, insights, and thoughts about the highs, lows, and in-betweens of building a startup: 

- It's not an easy or quick journey, but it's a bloody rewarding one. 

- You can't do it alone. If you think you can, you're kidding yourself. 

- You don't know what you don't know - you'll always be learning things you never knew you needed to know.

- Everything is about relationships. Start building them early and often. You never know who might be able to help you. 


Lastly, this is me behind the companies and experience: 
I love to: 
- Invent solutions
- Design product (UX - I'm great at functional, not so good at pretty)
- Support other founders (it's a bloody difficult journey)
- Inspire others
- Dream up & build the future!

2025 was both the hardest and best year of my life. 

My son was born. 

My feeling that I need to get my life sorted out increased massively (because of my son), increasing anxiety and general stress levels. 

1 key part of sorting my life out, is getting my company into a position that it can pay me decently, either from investment OR revenue (ideally the latter). 

We received many many no's from both investors & potential customers. BUT those decreased as the year went on, our tech got better, and our revenue increased. 

And there were multiple times throughout the year that I thought "this is the end of my company; my dreams"
 
In 2025, I really did have to bring one chapter of my life to a close (more on that when I have headspace to write about it).

But through all of that, I have persevered, massively thanks to my amazing wife, incredible team & supportive investors. 

And now, we're stronger than ever. Every demo I've given in the last month and a half, people have been stunned by the power of SuperScout. 

And in all of 2025, we made 481% more revenue than all of 2024. We're already on track to blow 2025 out of the water this year. 

Pure funding by revenue is no longer a pipe dream - we don't have it yet but I can see a real path to it now. 

I'm excited to see what 2026 has in store for me. I expect a LOT of demos if next week is any indicator.

Empowering filmmakers with radically better software (SuperScout); Dad, Founder, Mentor, Cat Dad

In 2025, we increased revenue by 481% while also reducing burn by 40%. 

It hasn't been easy. I am currently head of product, customer success, fundraising, sales, and everything else a founder CEO has to do... 

Closing a sale does NOT come naturally to me, but I absolutely love helping people & designing software (fortunately my job combines those). 

The wonderful thing about startups is you're thrown in at the deep end and you just have to figure it out (kind of like raising a child...) 


Through part luck, part interest, I've landed on focusing on the locations industry in film/tv. While building my last company I discovered that this industry had a rather shocking gap in software (by asking the right questions to the right people - Dr Lanning would be proud (gold star to you if you can name the movie reference without looking it up)).

Now I'm talking to people in this industry every day, hearing their pain points, and designing elegant solutions to reduce/remove those. And then as our team builds them we get feedback on initial tests. Once we release them, they're truly helpful & then each feature can easily be shown off in a sales demo. 

Being in charge of every part of this process is a lovely, natural loop. I can show I understand the needs of my customers, explain systems I've designed to meet those needs, and then give a quick demo of how they work, which leads to more customers, giving more useful feedback, helping us build more amazing product. 

2024 we built our initial proof of concept. 
2025 we closed our first key sales & people started to rely on our software. 
I can't wait to see what 2026 has in store for us.

I think we just built a world first time-saver for the locations world!

Here's a problem most people outside the film industry don't know about:

When a production is shooting, locations can't just be anywhere. There are often rules about how far they can be from a central point - a production office, main location, or something else. IF a location is outside that zone, contracts state that crew have to get paid extra for travel, accommodation, etc. So people try and avoid that unless the location really is incredible. 

🇺🇸 In NYC, there's a union defined zone of 30 miles from Columbus Circle. 
🇨🇦 In Toronto, the ACCP & ACTRA have different zones depending on the type of production people are working on. 
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 In England, a common rule is that things should be within 30 miles of the production office.

Until now, checking this has been entirely manual. Location managers would draw their boundary on a Google Map, then plot every single location they're considering, then cross-reference by hand. For every project! It wastes 100s of hours. 

We just fixed that in SuperScout.

You can now overlay production boundaries directly on your entire location database, or your individual project, or your share link. Every location instantly shows whether it's in or out of zone.

For location managers dealing with zone restrictions on every production, this will save 100s of hours per year. 

And when working with a film office or scout on SuperScout, you can tell them the zone so they only send relevant location suggestions.

I've made a quick video showing how it works 👇

I don't know why my brain works this way, but I love that it does. 

I just took my son to a playgroup. I didn't know anyone in the room. 
I met a few mums and a nanny - sadly no other dads... 

One of the mums were talking about how they were looking for a new place to live, near their parents in Twickenham but also near a good school. 

Instantly I thought of Graham's Jitty - jitty.com and so I suggested they could look on that for houses in proximity to good schools. 

A few minutes later another mom mentioned how her partner is a teacher, but doesn't want to do that forever. He really wants to start an ed tech company but also doesn't want to leave the security of his job especially with a young family. I immediately recommended he get in touch with James Green at DQventures - they help potential founders figure out how to start a company, while keeping the security of their job at the start. 

15 mins later the nanny and I got talking and she mentioned she's a stage actress who looks after kids between gigs. I asked her if she'd heard of CocoRio - a service that helps creatives find part time work as nannies, and parents bring some creativity into their kids lives. She hadn't. 

I have no idea if these people will follow up on these suggestions (they did all write them down, so that's encouraging), but I love that my brain instantly comes up with actionable ways to help people when I'm talking to them. 

Strangely I've looked into services like Intro stars to monetise this skill, and my brain just switches off and doesn't work reading through a list of people looking for intros. It seems it has to be organic - me talking to people. 

And honestly, I don't need to monetise it - SuperScout is moving forward fast! We had a super exciting new customer sign up just today!!! I love just being able to help people. 

Anyone else got this skill? How do you put it to use? 

(Random photo from our 1 yr olds birthday in a randomly nice hotel - incredibly breakfast - in a  bizarre town in Germany...)

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The Battle

Matt Jonns

🎥 Gabriel Isserlis

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Matt Jonns's LinkedIn Performance

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